Varvàra Fern is an artist on a journey. Her highly detailed bronze and resin-cast sculptures, which are featured in our current community exhibition, Walking the Edge, tell the stories of people taking their first steps along the path from unhappiness towards happiness, from imbalance towards inner peace. 

Varvàra was born and grew up in Russia, and before moving to the U.S., she studied at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow. There, she learned composition and figurative sculpture, both of which she continues to utilize in her work today. It wasn’t until she visited the U.S., however, that she stumbled upon what would become her artistic inspiration for the next several years. When she was 13, Varvàra and her family drove from Albuquerque, New Mexico to New York City. On this trip, she traveled down highways, past bridges, and through deserts and wooded landscapes. She became, in her own words, “hypnotized” by these landscapes and by what marked the borders between them: signposts, lampposts, and telephone poles, for example. To Varvàra, these markers felt sculptural: she started to notice their structures, materials, and rustic color schemes.

A few years later and back in Russia, Varvàra came across the work of Mike Brodie, a photographer whose series “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity” and “Tones of Dirt and Bone” include poetic images of his travels. Varvàra describes feeling that these images were often emotional, encapsulating a sense of despair. She also watched YouTube videos of travel and train hopping across the United States. 

Soon, Varvàra began translating her newfound interest in journeys and borders into complex sculptures. Her “Travel Series,” which she began at Surikov Art Institute in Moscow and continues today at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, involves a complex, multi-step process from inspiration to realization. 

First, Varvàra forms an image in her head. While listening to music (typically acoustic music, like that of artist Gustavo Santolalla), she sculpts a small clay “sketch” to determine how she can translate her mental image into a physical object. When she’s happy with a sketch, she casts her work into resin or plaster. Next, she rebuilds and refines her sketch to create a detailed clay sculpture, then eventually, she casts her final piece. While Varvàra wanted to cast most “Travel Series” sculptures in bronze, she had to adapt quickly when bronze casting became less accessible during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic; she also found that bronze sculptures travel poorly. To be able to keep working, Varvàra developed a technique of painting resin to look like bronze. Today, her bronze and resin pieces are virtually indistinguishable.

In addition to her “Travel Series,” Varvàra has another body of work formed around a very different subject: bulldogs. When asked about her inspiration, Varvàra remarked, “If people ask if I’m a cat or a dog person, I say I’m a bulldog person.” Varvàra grew up with two bulldogs, and reflects that to her, bulldogs seem very “human” as a result of their emotionally expressive faces. She also likes how they scratch themselves on the floor (“as if they’re dancing”) and how, no matter where they are, they will fall immediately asleep. 

As Varvàra continues along her own journey as a sculptor during and after her time at PAFA, she plans to continue playing with size, scale, material, and form. She wants to try out welding, to make a large-scale sculpture for “Travel Series”, and to explore new themes and topics, including her recent interest in representations of fairy tales. 

Whatever her subject matter, it’s clear that Varvàra will continue creating sculptures that are thoughtful, clever, and reflective of the journeys we all take throughout our lives from place to place and experience to experience, as well as how we learn, grow, and change as we travel both in space and in spirit. 

By Micah Lockman-Fine, Exhibitions Coordinator.

Artwork by Varvàra Fern.

If you’ve recently been to the Schuylkill Center, you may have noticed our gallery space is a bit more full than normal. In our current exhibition Walking the Edge, you’ll find hundreds of artworks, ranging from resin sculpture and vibrant photographs to large, earth-toned textiles. And since its debut, the most frequent question I hear is, “Are there really dead birds in that fridge?” This seems to be the response artist Matt Witmer hopes to elicit in viewers as he coyly refuses to reveal the truth. 

Dead Bird Fridge first came to be during Witmer’s time as a graduate student at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 2021. Part of a larger thesis show, the artwork consists of a small refrigerator litteredwith bird feces, secured with FrogTape and padlocks, and featuring a multimedia picture frame looping images of birds killed from window strikes at Tyler, most commonly yellowthroats, ruby-crowned kinglets, and ovenbirds. As a graduate of Tyler myself, I am all too familiar with the jarring experience of hearing birds smack into the gargantuan windows, only to fall to their death moments later. These huge glass windows have become a popular aesthetic choice in modern architecture and are often spoken of as a gateway to the exterior world. Witmer sees bird strikes as an immediate challenge to a modernist way of thinking that fails to recognize our own embeddedness in the natural world. Witmer says this artwork “documents the physical death toll of the imagined border between nature and civilization.” He often begins a project finding an infrastructure problem and “blowing it up” to discover what moral stance is implanted in the issue. In this case, glass architectural elements allow the viewer to look outside and feel connected to the natural world, but at the same time they isolate us from nature, and unfortunately, migratory birds are the indirect target of the violence perpetrated by these barriers. In fact, corporations and companies cannot be held accountable for causing avian deaths, but it is illegal for an individual to possess a migratory bird corpse because one can’t prove that they didn’t kill it. Witmer’s mysterious fridge toys with this indeterminate territory. 

We can imagine the creation of Dead Bird Fridge as a show, envisioning Witmer painstakingly searching out, collecting, and archiving these dead birds over many months. In fact, his graduate work culminated in a dystopian performance piece captured in video entitled The Last Bird, in which Witmer scaled the side of Tyler School of Art in an attempt to stop a fictional last bird left on earth from hitting the discreet windows. Viewers can’t help but find humor in the piece, especially in the reactions of clueless passing police. These artworks exist in gray areas, and just as we question if there are indeed birds in the padlocked fridge, we are left to contemplate the overall fate of these birds. In his research, Witmer made a connection to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, a law that essentially made it illegal to possess corpses of migratory birds at a time when many birds were at risk of extinction. As a result, bird enthusiasts end up finding research institutions to take the birds, so Witmer started a relationship with The Academy of Natural Sciences as part of their collection project. The ambiguity of this knowledge is integral to the functioning of the piece, as viewers confront the possibility of corpses in a locked container. 

Witmer’s tone is quite cheeky in a world where environmental artistic practice tends to skew impossibly hopeful or completely doom and gloom – just check out his artist statement and you will understand. Witmer was raised by environmentalist parents and spent much of his childhood outside birding and hiking. In 2016, he hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, an experience that he admits changed both him and his art. Art and trash he found along the trail became integral to his practice as he shifted back to the real world after months on the trail. Due to this experience, Witmer admits he is frustrated with our approaches to the current environmental situation and notes that while hope is important, it is equally essential to avoid the spiral that happens when contemplating our Earth’s fate, and that’s where dark humor comes into play. He admits to sometimes putting on a metaphorical jester hat to “speak truth to power in the guise of a ridiculous buffoon.” 

Moving forward, Witmer anticipates continuing his fascination and exploration of our waterways, and the Schuylkill River in general. Water, while a fundamental element of ecology, is something he sees as a force society is constantly trying to control rather than work with. Ultimately, the idea that nature exists in opposition to civilization is a construct, so the least we can do is laugh about it all – case in point – staging a perpetual video memorial, complete with a closed casket, for dead birds lost to forces that are invisible (at least to them).

By Kristina Murray, Director of Environmental Art.

Please visit the exhibition Walking the Edge, on view now through April 1, 2023. 

 

Images

Installation view, “Dead Bird Fridge,” Schuylkill Center, 2023. Photographer: Ricky Yanas.

Matt Witmer, “Dead Bird Fridge,” 2021. Photo courtesy of the artist. 

Still from “The Last Bird,” Tyler School of Art, October 27, 2021. Photo courtesy of the artist.

If you visit our art gallery, you won’t find any real or crafted plants, any carved or photographed trees, any mapped or painted landscapes. Instead, in Makeba Rainey’s show LESS IS MORE: The Nature of Letting Go, you’ll see large fabric portraits overlaid with patterns of African wax cloth, a Kwanzaa altar, a wall of church fans, and a cozy corner stocked with books. And you may wonder: how is this environmental art?

The answer is both clear and complex—namely, we humans are also part of nature.

As Tina Plokarz, Director of Environmental Art, puts it, “I believe today’s environmental practice can express itself in many ways—as a public action, political demonstration, or personal behavior. But it can also be a social practice that grows on building empathy across communities.” Ecology also works at the human level and in relationships between human communities; if they’re frayed, then our relationship with the environment will also suffer.  

Tina continues, “I invited Makeba Rainey to the Schuylkill Center because I was fascinated by the care and respect her works embody for community, particularly the Black community in the region”—because Rainey’s LESS IS MORE is created specifically by and for Black people, a group (in Philadelphia and around the country) that has historically been subject to high levels of environmental racism, from unchecked air pollution and contaminated water to redlining in districts with comparatively little tree cover. The sacred and memorial space Rainey has created in the gallery offers a much-needed counter: an invitation for healing, rest, and rejuvenation. All are vital for building and sustaining Black community.  

The show also pushes back against a dominant capitalist ideology of never-ending growth and linear progression, instead insisting that we are part of a cycle of life and death—and that cyclicality, with its inherent sustainability, is worth celebrating. Throughout the gallery, birth, life, and death coexist and move in a circle rather than a line: starting in one corner with midwifery artifacts from Rainey’s great aunt, tools for bringing new life into the world; moving on to a reading corner full of resources for life and accounts of lives lived; around to a memorial wall with church fans featuring photos of the recently deceased; and finally to a liminal space of an altar surrounded by two portraits, one of a late midwife, the other of a new mother and her child. Look closely and you’ll also find globes and spheres scattered through the space, underscoring this cyclicality.  

Moreover, the exhibition not only features Rainey’s work as a visual artist (the two portraits), but also other aspects of her practice: curation and community organizing. Indeed, Rainey directly created only a few items in the gallery and curated the rest from collaborators and community. A bouquet made by Meagan Cook of The Botanic Village and a t-shirt by Sudan Green both stand in memory of a friend killed by gun violence. A haunting and evocative soundscape by Julien Terrell plays from a corner. The church fans feature photos submitted by Philadelphians, while the book collection reflects lists curated by a host of Black librarians, booksellers, activists, and educators. Again and again, Rainey reminds us: care for each other and care for the planet will be found in community.  

Similarly, the exhibition does not end where the gallery walls do. Rather, intrinsic to the show are the events programmed alongside it, opportunities to put the show’s themes into embodied practice: cultivating protected space Black community, honoring connection, and finding peace in letting go. These events, a birding outing on March 19 and an art and yoga workshop on March 26, are offered in partnership with In Color Birding Club and Spirits Up!, relationships Rainey brings with her as an artist. While it is easy to consider birding a scientific exercise and yoga a physical practice, in this context they’re imagined more holistically. Birding becomes a way to celebrate companionship, human and non-human alike, and yoga a way to nourish creativity and calm through the power of movement and breath. 

Whether you identify as Black or not, we hope this show inspires you to think about the role our human relationships play in our relationships to other living beings, plants and animals. What does it mean to see environmental and social justice as one in the same, and how can we create systems that allow both to flourish? We invite you to cultivate the regenerative energy of community while exploring what sustainability looks like as a circle, not a line.

LESS IS MORE: The Nature of Letting Go is on view through March 26. To learn more about the Center’s art exhibitions, go to www.schuylkillcenter.org/art.

By Emily Sorensen, Exhibitions Coordinator

On Saturday, December 4, our art gallery will be decked out in dazzling portraits of local Black figures, Liberation leaders, and ancestors, created by Philadelphia artist and community organizer Makeba Rainey. Her exhibition, LESS IS MORE: The Nature of Letting Go, will be on display through March 26, and is, as she describes it, “a celebration of a distinctly Black American ingenuity.” Her title refers less to a reverence for minimalism for its own sake than “a call to do the most with the least… as we have always done.” 

Bright colors and patterns of African wax cloth frame defiant, determined, and joyful faces in Rainey’s signature portrait style, one that has evolved since time spent in elementary school playing around with Microsoft Paint. While Rainey’s color palette has always been vivid, the framed faces have come more into focus over time and the surrounding patterning more complex—and more distinctly African. Now a self- (and YouTube-) taught expert in Photoshop, Rainey has pioneered a style that’s increasingly popular thanks to a few “high profile commissions (give thanks!)” and especially social media. Her work has inspired many imitators and garnered more than 14,000 Instagram followers. It’s an artistic sensibility she loves because it “is so accessible and has created a visual language with which to express pride in our African-ness.”

Beyond her own visual artwork, Rainey is transforming the gallery into a healing, memorial space, complete with a restorative reading corner for rest and reflection. This reading space is an extension of a project Rainey has been working on for a while now with a Black artists collective she started—the B(A)LM Community Library—and features books curated alongside other Philadelphia-based organizers, educators, and booksellers. Opposite this corner, another gallery wall will be covered in church fans dedicated to recently deceased members of the Philadelphia Black community. Outdoor wall art and seating (look for a swing!) extend the exhibition onto our grounds, and are an invitation to recharge and take solace in nature. 

Through this medley of spaces and artwork, Rainey explores how Blacks can access the energy of nature necessary for community and self-sustainability. More particularly, she asks us, how do we harness nature while also living in ethical and resourceful accord with it? Especially in this time of global scarcity—keenly and unjustly felt by those living in already under-resourced communities in our city—what does it look like to live sustainably, to find sustenance in ancestors, neighbors, family, and friends? 

In that vein, Rainey’s work is characterized by extensive collaborations with fellow artists, local organizations, and community members. As she puts it, “My community are my collaborators and my collaborators are my community.” For this exhibition, her creative partners include fellow Philadelphia artists Dominique London (creator of Skoolie, a school bus turned into a sustainable tiny home), musician and yogi Sudan Green (of SpiritsUp!) and sound designer Julien Terrell, among others. Together they will provide guided and meditative walks, healing rituals, and sustainable art workshops. 

When asked what she looks for in a collaborator, Rainey says “folks who share the same love and compassion that I have for ALL Black people. Folks who are authentic in spirit and diligent in their craft. Folks who are kind and who give more than they take. Folks who are constantly pushing themselves to be and do better. And, probably most important, people who can’t do what I can.” They’re folks who already are or become her family, and who complement each other personally, artistically, and spiritually. 

For Rainey, community also extends beyond the living; ancestors are as important as one’s current family, whether blood or chosen. The exhibition—its title and the ethos it reflects—is “an expression of gratitude and reverence for our ancestors,” Rainey says. It’s an exhortation to remember “you are who they were. Nothing more. Nothing less.” That’s why she’s covering one wall with church fans featuring photos of the recently deceased. Not only do church fans hold a particular place in Black culture, for Rainey they also help in “imagining their [an ancestor’s] spirit as the wind sweeping over you. Imagine them with you in your moments of respite and of praise… because they are. They are with you always.”

We will celebrate the exhibition’s opening at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, December 4 with a restorative walk through the Center’s grounds, a ceremonial drink, and conversation between the artist and cultural worker and healer Hakim Pitts. They’ll discuss the exhibition’s inspirations, Rainey’s printmaking process, working with nature, and building community. “When you work with/for the people you love and who love you back,” Rainey says, “the work will always be good.” Please register for the free event.

LESS IS MORE is presented by the Schuylkill Center’s Department of Environmental Art. 

By Emily Sorensen, Exhibitions Coordinator.

The Center’s Board of Trustees bid a fond farewell to Deenah Loeb, who completed three consecutive three-year terms. For most of her tenure, Deenah chaired the environmental art committee working very closely with that department’s director. She has been a tireless advocate for our environmental art program and guiding the use of our land as a living laboratory for how an art program enhances an area’s natural habitat.

Fellow board member, Leah Douglas, appreciated Deenah’s legacy and said, “her dedication, thoughtfulness, and commitment to the art committee has been inspirational. She has consistently proven to think outside the box, and always has the arts be top of mind at the Schuylkill Center.”

Director of Environmental Art Tina Plokarz was especially grateful to Deenah who has been a mentor to her prior to joining the staff. Tina spoke on behalf of previous art directors who “have been and continue to be grateful for her breadth of knowledge and her generous availability to always be of assistance.”

In closing, Deenah reminded the board that “we need to inspire the creative voice in whatever we do. Having that creative voice will only further the Schuylkill Center’s uniqueness in Philadelphia and beyond.”

Thank you, Deenah!

By Amy Krauss, Director of Communications